The World Wide Web has drastically modified the way information is being shared, and this caused an intense impact on business advertising and marketing. Over the past years, there’s been a significant shift toward inbound strategies, while a lot of outbound approaches have become antiquated. More companies find success in publishing original content instead of placing advertisements within their external content, due to the extra advantages these tactics offer, such as audience growth and branding.

With these web marketing trends, the following predictions for the year 2014 are bound to happen:

Rapid Growth of Content Marketing

One of the most important ways that businesses can use to prove authority and to gain the trust of their consumers is by constantly creating priceless content with a variety of channels. Overall, this involves getting the right insight on relevant industry information which provides enough data or entertainment to the target audience. Doing so permits the company to progressively build connection with its demographic in addition to developing its own brand. According to recent studies, the major B2B content marketing techniques are videos, social media, eNewsletters, articles on a business web page, case studies, and articles on other web sites.

By making use of a combination of these channels, companies are able to build positive reputation and branding within their industry. The trend suggests that web marketing to the masses in the course of techniques such as radio and television ads are becoming a thing of the past due to its ineffective impact. Instead, it’s best to focus on inbound marketing which can be accomplished by coming up with valuable, engaging content that is good for a specific audience.

More Diversity in Social Media Marketing

A few years ago, companies were inadequate about implementing social media networks with their marketing and advertising campaigns. Now, with the help of the biggies like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, it seems like new social media pages are surfacing all the time. While others never really hit the right spot, others like Instagram, Tmblr, Pinterest, and Google+ have soared high in popularity and provided companies with a plethora of creative options that let them to generate engaging content in various media forms. Needless to say, building their audiences across different channels became an easy task.

Accordingly, it has become ordinary for companies to branch out and conduct experiment with many networks with the aim of reaching the highest amount of clients. This diversification appears to be productive for many organizations because it often builds brand fair play by making it more convenient for consumers to be familiar with a particular brand.

Image-Centric Content

As clients are hit with loads of advertisements, it became more significant to make web content quickly “digestible”. The top three social media sites have one thing in common – they emphasize on images. The speedy rise to success of Pinterest and Buzzfeed are proofs to the viral and powerful potential of image-based content.

Booming blog posts that get the most number of social shares typically have a common feature: they pepper in several well-placed photos to break the content up and highlight certain points. Infographics likewise combines images with a minimal number of texts to explain a particular topic as well as to give data or statistical information from research studies.